


She Who Would Breed Lilacs

by creaturequiet



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Incest, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 15:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4792838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creaturequiet/pseuds/creaturequiet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giant robots and a resurrection machine that requires death to pay for the life brought back. From a tumblr prompt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Who Would Breed Lilacs

When Rose disappeared a few hours after her mother’s death, Dave immediately knew where to look.

Growing up, Rose had spent a lot of thetime in the temple. Every one knew that upon LOLAR’s creation it had been nothing short of an agricultural paradise, but no one quite knew how the temple had gotten there or what it meant, though there were legends that the original colonists were killed and the sea left barren by whatever power was sealed within. Most of the few people that managed to make a living off of turtle meat and salt mining were too busy and too superstitious to be bothered with the place, but Rose was the daughter of a visiting scientist. She had more than enough time to make the temple into her own personal playground.  

Dave doubted she had gone there to play, this time. He felt numb as he ascended the stairs that led to the center of the temple, passing the walls covered in strange markings. Rose had explained the ones she had managed to decode, though her knowledge wasn’t perfect. A few of the markings still evaded her, and she had disclosed her suspicion that it was because she didn’t yet have the frame of reference necessary to decipher them— that they symbolized things unlike anything she had encountered. One thing had read clear, a prophecy written in every room:  _They wait for she who would breed lilacs out of the dead land._

He was not surprised when he found her at the top of the building, picturesque as she lay on the stone slab in the center of the room, illuminated by a shaft of light coming in from the open part of the ceiling. Wires emerging from her stone bed had fused into her skin, and the room stunk of iron. She had sunken a knife into her stomach all the way up to the hilt, and her shirt was stained with blood. As he entered the room, she turned her head to look at him with glossy eyes and skin that was visibly damp with sweat. Dave felt a rush of anger that made him clamp his teeth together.

“I figured out what the prophecy meant.” she said in a voice that did not even come close to disguising her pain.

“Why the fuck would you do this to yourself?”

“At the moment, that’s really besides the point. I could use your help.”

“Oh, great. Of course you need my help. Here is a wild idea. Ask before fusing yourself to to mystic body horror death temple?”

She smiled dryly, if you could call it a smile at all. “You wouldn’t have agreed to to this.”

“Hell no I wouldn’t have.”

“For your information, I didn’t know that I needed your help until it was already too late. If you hadn’t arrived my impending death may have gone to waste.”

His shoulders slumped, the physical equivalent of a sigh. “What do you need?”

“I just need you to stay here.” she laid her head back down flat on the slab and fixed a determined gaze at the ceiling. “Because I’m scared. It’s interfering with the transfusion.”

“What are you hoping to accomplish here?”

“You’ll see what is to come of this soon enough. It should be rather hard to miss. Why are you standing so far away? Are you afraid?”

“No way, you owe me an explanation. You can’t just off yourself without warning and not even bother to tell me why,” he said, ignoring her question as he walked across the room awkwardly until the distance between them was closed.

“I would love to tell you all about how I deciphered an ancient code and discovered that all of my most absurd childhood theories were more than correct. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time left.”

It was quiet for a moment, as her face continued to visibly pale. Dave touched the top of her hand lightly, carefully avoiding all of the wires. “I don’t want you to die.”

She finally looked away from the ceiling, instead turning her somehow still aggressive gaze towards him as she panted openly. “It’s for the best.”

Dave’s hand moved again, this times reaching for her face. He resisted the urge to tear the wires straight out of her skin and leaned down to kiss her clumsily, desperation making it impossible to do much more than crush his mouth against her face. She returned the kiss; but only briefly. When Dave stopped a few long seconds later, she was dead and whirring sounds were filling the room. The runes on the wall were illuminated from behind, starting from the ground and working upwards while the room filled with the heat of a computer working too hard. A noise like rock breaking was followed by the Earth quaking so that Dave was forced to his knees, wondering if the temple was going to cave in on him and force him to die there with his sister’s corpse. The sound grew louder and louder, the earth shook more violently, and then—

It stopped. And then footsteps. Unbelievably huge, crashing footsteps just outside of the building. The room went dark as a shadow was cast over the temple. Dave got to his feet and looked up, only to find _it_ looking down at him— a  single large, bulging eye hovered above the skylight. The exchange lasted little more than a second before the eye moved and the thing it belonged to effortlessly removed the entire ceiling and plucked Dave from where he stood and sat him on its massive metal hand. Down below, lilacs bloomed across the land.


End file.
